Technical Field
This disclosure relates to systems and methods used to identify and retrieve relevant images from one or more image sources using customized image preference criteria.
Description of the Related Art
Many companies provide digital images for sale, for lease, or otherwise make images available to customers to use. For example, Getty Images® and Corbis® provide a wide variety of images including images of artwork, people, and landmarks. Microsoft® through Bing® images and Google® through Google images provide a wide variety of satellite images. Pictometry International Corp. captures high resolution aerial images using airplane-mounted cameras and makes those images available for purchase or subscription. Many other providers, including individual photographers, also acquire and provide images and make them publicly available through databases, bulletin boards, social media sites such as Facebook®, Google+® and other forums.
Each of these images typically include image data, for example, data representing individual pixels that make up the visual representation of an image, and metadata that describes information about the image. Metadata of aerial images of ground features may include the date the image was captured, the resolution of the image, the source of the image such as an image vendor or a copyright holder, the position of the camera at the time the image was captured, the latitude/longitude of the camera at the time the image was captured, the latitude/longitude coordinates of the image edges, and so on. Metadata may be associated with an image as a tagged data field or embedded directly into the image data.
Finding the most relevant images to use for a particular task, for example, for analyzing real property or a building on the property, typically involves using individual manual or electronic searches to try to locate where property or building images reside, or to locate the names of image providers likely to have the images being sought.
The searcher may also use an image title, subject matter or other image metadata attributes to search for relevant images across multiple image sources. Once a set of images is retrieved, a manual process is typically used to evaluate each image to select a subset of images that are the most relevant for the task.